Clarizen Blog

Remove the agony of timesheet reporting with Clarizen’s AI

When we launched the Clarizen Bot last year, we were excited about leveraging the latest AI technology to provide value to our users. The very first skills we taught the bot were to help project managers stay on top of their projects. For those already in team chat platforms, instead of having to switch apps, they could easily @mention the Clarizen Bot to get project status updates.

We’ve added many new skills and use cases for a broader audience while staying in line with our core tenets: we want to help you save time by creating an experience that is intuitive and proactive. We are correspondingly always looking for new ways the bot can expand the value it brings.

And, in that spirit, I’m excited to announce that the Clarizen Bot is now available on Microsoft Teams

Saving time by making experiences more intuitive

By partnering with Google to leverage Natural Language Processing technology, we’ve been able to create an experience that is simple to the user. Instead of having to memorize an exact string of commands, the AI is able to read through the variations and the typos (oh, the typos!) to deliver on your intent.

To log time, all the user needs to do is to type something like, “Log 30m on Project Eagle.” While seemingly simple, a lot of complexity goes behind understanding user intent for those 24 characters.

However, the effort has paid off. We now have customers using the Bot to onboard their teams. Instead of having to go through training, they can start executing simple commands with the Bot.

What we’ve found most successful is that the Bot helps teams save time by simplifying routine work that needs to be done on a daily basis — like logging your timesheets.

The traditional way would be to look through a maze of projects, and find the right cell to log time. A more natural and intuitive way is to tell the Bot what you want and let it deal with it.

This results in managers having to constantly hit refresh to see the status of their teams. Again, this is where a chat interface can simplify the experience. At any given time, a manager can ask the bot to retrieve time reported in a format that makes sense and is the most relevant:

“Show me alpha group’s timesheets for last June”

One company that tested out the feature told us, “I brought in two managers to test it out. Then they started showing it off to other managers. Now everyone is clamoring to get the Clarizen Bot.”

Saving time by understanding your workflow

While it’s great that the bot can respond to a user’s command, sometimes a manager doesn’t want to have to think about it. A common use case we heard when talking to our users is that managers are chasing down team status on a Friday afternoon or early Monday morning.

What we ended up doing instead was enable manager to ask the bot to automatically deliver the timesheet report at whatever time works best for them, whether daily at 4:45PM PST or every Friday at 3:45 PM PST.

At Clarizen, we believe in creating a world where work is simplified and goals can be met. From a product perspective, we’re committed to ensuring that information is transparent, readily available and meets you where you are — all in an effort to remove any obstacles from getting your work done.